I’ll see you on a grocery store shelf or my kitchen counter, and for an instant (pardon the pun) the world is transformed into a retro-futurist dystopia. You become the preordained pseudo-food of the unwashed proles or whatever has replaced them (the ninety-nine percent or living dead), with little-to-no nutritional value beyond a mild tempering of foul water.

Each variation in artificial flavor suggests an irretrievable loss of the verifiable. You parade the illusion of choice and embody class war defeat. You’re suddenly equivalent to fecal matter mud pies, soylent green, cockroach jelly cake, a grease-n’-rot soup for the ongoing present.

Colonial monsters surround us, robustly alive and unrepentant. They reveal themselves in claiming you are a freeze-dried yellow horde overtaking Western Civilization.

And then, as if none of this has just occurred to me, I marvel at your affordability. Memories of your salty base titillate (like a shared dirty secret). And you flatter me. I feelso resourceful and creative around you. Just look at the way I use up that old half-onion, grey sandwich meat slice and moldy eggplant at the back of the fridge. How do I know to add just the right amount of garlic and sriracha? Genius! And I’m sated for nothing! I’m sticking it to the man, defying the prescribed, turning the generic into something singular. You nurture the emancipatory promise of production-in-use, people power, a better world through the discovery of our own desires.

I can’t avoid considering this stuff. There’s no way to stop thinking about you. You’ve joined the ever-expanding pantheon of ubiquitous objects within Modernity. You pile onto the scrap heap of our reification and beg for allegorical significance.